


Spider Web

by 50artists



Category: Claymore (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Body Horror, Character Death, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:28:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23098603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/50artists/pseuds/50artists
Summary: It often felt like Clare’s head was empty, nowadays. Like she’d traded away all her thoughts along with her flesh.
Relationships: Clare/Jean (Claymore)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	Spider Web

**Author's Note:**

> warning on this one if u dont like descriptions of violence/gore, this is probs not for u. Claymore is so fucked up honestly why did i like it so much aged 13.

Clare was half herself.

She was one-quarter a woman with long hair and a slow smile.

She was one-quarter something else entirely.

~*~*~

It often felt like Clare’s head was empty, nowadays. Like she’d traded away all her thoughts along with her flesh. When she was a human everything had been white-hot with emotion, from joy to anguish to fear to hate, but now it was dulled down and suppressed. 

Clare had faced horrors that would make a human run screaming in terror. She’d had her limbs cut from her body, and painfully reattached them herself. She’d felt the sensation of blades running through her torso. People she cared about had been threatened and maimed and killed as she watched. She had failed again and again. She had been ranked lowest of the low. 47 out of 47. A failure. Clare even knew the feeling of her jaw as it elongated and turned carnivorous, she knew the twang of her half-monstrous legs as they distended and grew out sickeningly bowed. But for all of that, she’d never really known contentment. They said Teresa was happy, in those last few weeks. Clare was happy too, but only in a frenzied and pitifully hopeful way; she’d never felt that calm contentment that she saw in Teresa’s smile, the happy acceptance, the _yes, this is good_.

~*~*~

(Teresa wanted her to be happy, Teresa wanted her to be safe, Teresa would be _devastated_ if she could see Clare now, more monster than human, awakened, on the run, shunned by society and Organisation alike. Teresa’s faint smile would tumble off her lips.)

~*~*~

Jean was a person with a lot of guts.

Metaphorically. But also literally.

When Clare first found her she was not even human, not at all; she was strung up and spilling out, with too many limbs and too many teeth, like a grotesque spider-web of a woman. But she was speaking. Not with the inhuman calm of an Awakened one. Just a human voice, raw and shattered and pained, and it shouldn’t have been possible but it was. 

The dust settled and Jean followed her. Followed Clare. What a joke; Clare had done nothing, really, and it had been in her own best interest to bring Jean’s body back from beyond the brink. That was the usual rule followed by their Organisation. Debts were not between individual warriors, who had no real autonomy and no real life, who were worth nothing special. Debts were to humans and to the Organisation. Not each other. It was as absurd as having a debt to a yoma, or an Awakened One.

Jean followed her anyway.

~*~*~

(Clare was not repaying a _debt_ to Teresa, except maybe it was a debt, or maybe not, because Teresa wasn’t owed so much as she was loved, and anyway she was gone now, dead forever.)

~*~*~

It was nice, in a way, to travel with someone.

Clare would not say she was a lonely person; in fact she was ~~not a person at all~~ perfectly used to moving through life alone. Raki, much as he was a dear, had been with her for only a small fraction of her time. Teresa had lasted just a few weeks. Most if not all of her life had been alone, and her brain was used to the silence and the selfishness of existing without accounting for those around her. She wasn’t accustomed to conferring with others on where she would go or what she would do.

Jean was easy-going, though. She was stronger than Clare, and had no need for the frequent stops or food that a human might require.

“You know,” Clare said a few days into their travel, “you don’t owe me, number 9.”

“I do.”

Clare bit her lip. Frustration, she forced herself to remember; this emotion was frustration. “I saved you for my own reasons. If you’d fully Awakened, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to defeat you.”

“That’s fine,” Jean countered, “your reasons don’t matter. Just your actions.”

~*~*~

Jean was quiet, but something in her presence was bold; her very body language seemed to scream _I'm here, so deal with it_. There was no hesitation or self-consciousness in the way she moved.

Jean's arms, Clare noticed, were strong. Muscular in a way that her own twig-like physique could probably never accomplish.

Jean's face was beautiful, but not in the way people noticed. She wasn't someone you'd glance at and immediately recognise as a beauty. Rather, she had a face that Clare only grew to appreciate in bits and pieces. The curve of her blonde eyelashes against those pigmentless eyes. Full lips. The ageless skin stretched over her cheekbones - and how old was Jean, anyway? Why did she end up in the Organisation's clutches? What was her story?

Clare didn't ask. But she did start to wonder.

~*~*~

(Her memories of Teresa were carefully curated. If she brought them up too often, they might wear out - but if she let them fade into the background they might lose their detail, become shapeless and undefined, just another broken part of a broken body...)

~*~*~

Clare tried again, a different night, a different moon above them. "Why are you following me?"

Jean was laid by the campfire they'd made. Her strong legs, sprawled out casually, caught the fire's glint and seemed to light up orange. Her head was tilted back to the stars. Clare could see the way the tendons in her neck shifted as she replied. "Because I owe you, Clare. Because it's right."

"I told you that you don't owe me."

Jean lifted her head, just slightly, just enough to meet Clare's eyes. "Do you want me to leave? I will, if you ask me to."

Clare was the first to glance away. 

"No," she admitted, "I don't want you to leave." The words tasted strange against her tongue.

~*~*~

Clare was only one-half herself; it was useless to speculate on what she'd be without her yoma flesh, the things she would want, the purpose she could fulfill.

(She would never wish away Teresa, though. Never wish away their shared blood, that connected them like sisters, that was all that remained of a woman who'd lived so many years ago.)

Still, Clare couldn't help but notice that she was missing out in life. She wasn't resentful. Rather, she noted the little luxuries afforded to normal humans with a dispassionate curiosity. They ate foods that were more for pleasure than nutrition - cakes and sweet breads and sugar cane. They drank ale and wine and they revelled in the way it dulled their brains, as if they didn't realise how _vulnerable_ they were even without intoxicants. They leered at her on street corners and said, _hey girlie, hey slayer, I bet I could show you a good time_. Clare had never been tempted. Not by sex or food or wine or any other petty human distraction.

With Jean, though, she sometimes wondered -

Because it was different, this pull towards another human, something she was experiencing for the first real time. It wasn’t the leering heat of men at street corners and brothels. It wasn’t the almost sisterly need she felt to care and protect for Raki. It was just something like background noise, easy to ignore but impossible to block out, a constant little thread of something charged in the air.

There was never the right time to address it.

Even if there had been a right time, what would the right words be? Clare didn’t know.

And even if she found the moment, and she found the words - what then?

It was all too much, too confusing and difficult and risky, so Clare shoved it deep down inside and resolved to confront it all another day. Maybe she really would have, too. But then they were both called to the North.

~*~*~

Clare felt warmth, right in the pit of her stomach.

It was the first thing she had felt in so long. She _wanted_ it. Clare had forgotten how it felt to want, with all that mortal human longing; not the cool desire for revenge against Priscilla, not even the spark of interest with Jean, but full-on desire that ripped through her soul. Before she even processed it, she was changing.

God, how had Jean possessed the strength of will to resist this pull?

It just felt so good, so natural, as she allowed her flesh to yield into the shape it should always have been; a cascade of bladed limbs unfurling from her spine, like arms but longer and stronger and more flexible. How had she lived so long without this? It was like finding her true body for the first time.

(oh, Jean)

and Jean was there and Jean was talking to her and Jean had pushed too far and too deep and Jean didn’t listen to the human still left in her and Jean was… and Clare could _feel_ every ounce of it and suddenly it wasn’t pleasure but revulsion running through her spine as she felt the sensation of her own limbs bursting through Jean’s spine and Jean’s muscules and Jean’s armour and Jean’s guts -

and Jean - 

and there was -

And Clare reeled back into humanity, and Jean was dead on the floor beside her, _dead,_ still bleeding from where Clare’s blades had stuck through her flesh (just like how Jean had been tortured by Riful of the West, just like how Teresa had been sliced apart, just like how…) and Jean was still dead, and still dead, not even moving her head to murmur or whimper, not even breathing. Dead. Gone.

Clare picked up her sword. It felt unnaturally heavy in that puny, human-looking hand, so much smaller than her Awakened form. She had no time to mourn; she was already fighting, already running and slashing, already succumbing to fate. If her heart was screaming behind the cool mask of her face, it didn’t matter. Jean was dead.

~*~*~

(Teresa's face came to her in her death-sleep, Teresa's head still so lifelike as it sat body-less on the ground, apart from now she was joined by another ghost, Jean with Clare's own limbs bursting through her torso, Jean as those sparking eyes and muscular arms were reduced to nothing more than components of a carcass, and in her dream Clare cried and screamed and howled and knew that things would never change, never go back, and maybe the world was always meant to furl out this way.)

~*~*~  
When Clare woke up later, Jean was still dead.

There would be no vengeance for this; she was Jean’s murderer and Jean’s saviour, all rolled up into one. What more was there to do? Where could Clare go, from here? The ground of the North was cold beneath her bare hands. Slowly, she pulled herself to her feet. Let her brain fill out into blankness.

Best to keep her head empty.

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr is [xenixat](http://xenixat.tumblr.com) :^)


End file.
